Friday, May 25, 2018

Artificial Intelligence and the Project Manager

Organizations use teams to create wealth, market share,
customer service, competitive advantage, and organizational success. Effective teams accomplish their assigned end
goals by engaging in collaboration as a joint learning activity. Enhanced effectiveness is why collaborative
tools are so critical to the project manager, and 7 out of 10 IT professionals
see collaboration
as essential to their organization.

For an information worker operating within a modern team
environment, finding information is relatively easy. Any team member can “google”
to find just about anything. High-performance teams, however, know how to work
together to brainstorm and collaborate on discovering the right questions. That
concept frames the future of collaboration and the project manager’s role. The
most effective project managers use
artificial intelligence (AI) to apply computational approaches to the collaborative
social experience. In laymen’s terms that means using AI to discover the right
questions. Research has shown this approach as a
more robust method of helping
humans solve increasingly complex business problems.

As AI and collaboration technologies enhance and spread intelligence
equally to any worker, machine learning technologies provide just-in-time custom learning based on team needs and the organizational
goals. Collaboration technology should, therefore, also help ease the challenge
of connecting physically remote teams to each other. This critical function allows more interaction, more collective learning, more collaboration, and
more team success. By embracing this new remote collaboration paradigm, project
managers can:

Identify and engage critical talent independent
of their location. This capability improves the manager’s ability to bring complementary skills into a collaborative environment
with the broader team;

Encourage and build healthy relationships with
remote team members. Strong relationshipsare the heart of effective collaboration
and leadership;

Present and communicate a guiding vision to the
team. Providing clarity of purpose enhances collaboration;

Work with local and remote team members to jointly
prepare a clear mission objective and define group rules of engagement;

These are all reasons why Cisco launched Webex
Teams. This collaborative platform uses machine learning to present an intelligent
and human-like conversational interface for any application or device. With this
capability, project managers can eliminate the friction usually associated with remote team member communications. The
solution has also embedded Webex
Assistant, an AI-enabled service for
managing directory and scheduling information and designed to assist,
participate, and take action that supports
the project manager. Webex Assistant leverages the powerful Webex graph to
access better information faster. In doing so,
it essentially injects artificial intelligence into every team interaction.